The central HQ of the 2009 Art Strike Biennial switched constantly between Alytus Art School, Hotel Dzukija about five minutes walk away, and a bar-cum-restaurant located between these two venues in downtown Alytus. At the art school a lot of coffee was consumed, at the hotel innumerable bottles of wine, and in the bar industrial quantities of beer and cold beetroot soup. The Dzukija was an old school Soviet hotel, a concrete shell with stained glass in some of the public areas and cantilevered stairs between the floors. The building was absolutely crammed full of original oil paintings by official Soviet artists of yesteryear. In keeping with the Dzukija’s theme of Soviet nostalgia, the maids would leave overflowing bins in the bathrooms and failed to replenish toilet paper; all of which created a very relaxed bohemian atmosphere.

We call on all bloggers to turn off their computers and cease to post from 17 to 30 August 2009.

Blogging is an indulgence of a self-perpetuating elite; those who can afford regular access to computers and the internet. Those bloggers who struggle against the reigning society find their work either marginalised or else co- opted by the bourgeois net establishment.

Blogging creates the illusion that, through activities which are actually waste, this civilisation is in touch with ‘higher sensibilities’ which redeem its exploitation of those who live outside the overdeveloped world. Those who accept this logic support the bourgeoisie even if they are economically excluded from the class.

A forthcoming Art Strike Biennial has been announced to take place in Alytus (Lithuania) in 2009. Among other things this Biennal will act as a focus for opposition to Linz and Vilnius acting as European Capitals of Culture in 2009. In 2011 a second Art Strike Biennial will take place to oppose the gentrification of Tallin and Turku.

The Art Strike Biennial was initially called by Redas Dirzys and other activists from Eastern Europe. The Transient Art Strike Biennial Supreme Council of One (London) will participate in the Art Strike Biennial by refusing to produce new work, choosing instead to plagiarise and recycle pre-existing Art Strike materials; as well as encouraging other forms of cultural cannibalism. Simultaneously our experiments in time travel have enabled us to colonise Elizabethean London where we are busy (de)composing the entire works of Shakespeare, Bacon, Middleton, &c.)